Bit Literacy Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload By Mark Hurst

Bit Literacy - Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload is a book by Mark Hurst.

Who Should Read This Book

I think this book should be mandatory for people that are starting out in the corporate world.

Any company whose business depends on email should spend a day training everyone in the practices outlined in this book.
I also think that kids going off to University would benefit from reading it because they have a massive information overload plus the new social media.

Book Outline

This book outlines different ways to improve your productivity and manage your information overload.

It tells you how to:

• Keep up with magazines and newsletters
• Sort, name and store digital photos so you can find them later
• Understand some of the alphabet soup we see all the time such as - png, pdf, aiff, jpg, jpeg, gif and doc, just to list a few.

Email Inbox

Mark’s first step may be the most radical concept:

• Clear out incoming emails as they come in.

Delete all of the mail in you inbox. File some, to be sure, but totally empty your inbox. This is not something that you do once, but every day.

Drastic as this may seem, he has a logic that will free you from being bogged down by an inbox with hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox. These hundreds of mails just show how much work we have, or appear to have.

Although bits have no real weight, bits are heavy. A full inbox makes people feel overwhelmed and Mark says you should empty your mailbox daily and keep your inbox in a steady-state of emptiness.

In his company he actually uses these processes as rules. The first rule “read personal mail first” is hard for some to accept. His logic is that telling employees that their family has a lower priority on all other email, including the interoffice memo is simply bad for the morale.

Mark has an effective way to work with Newsletters and bulk mailing, FYI mail and advice on how to build a proper to-do list.

His system for dealing with older mail would be seen as dramatic by some - delete everything. He has a process to follow. Totally clear your inbox and keep it clear to never feel overwhelmed by email again.

This is not a halfway solution. Do this once, even if it takes a full day, until your inbox is empty. After the fist cleaning you will decide if you do mail twice a day or leave it open all the time. No matter what, when you close you inbox it has to be empty. File, scan, action, delete.

To-do list

Mark Hurst has a very effective style of handling your to-do list, which he refers to as “todos”.

Mark recommends choosing one with about the fewest features possible because this is not a tool to do one hundred things. This is to manage your list of things that you must action. Mark offers his software that is an inexpensive online tool as being the best solution because it was built to do exactly this.

One point that Mark teaches is to use email to help manage your to-do list. Set up an email to be sent to you on a future date to remind you to follow up on a future to-do item. All too often people like to get out of answering by saying “I’ll do that next week” and a to-do list should be able to keep track of these open promises so you can follow up the week later that was requested.

The Media Diet

Mark describes the information avalanche that we live under today and offers some solutions to get out from under it. These are steps that will help you deal with your information overload.

• You can do nothing, and remain where you are right now.
• You can drop everything and live knowing that ignorance is bliss.
• You can practice bit literacy and create your own media-diet.

Your media diet must contain as few sources of information as possible. You need to find the balance between:

• Limiting these sources of information to not waste time
• Keeping the information that you need away from you.

You will learn to skip items in your media diet that don’t really help you. You also learn to leave yourself open to new information, at least enough to decide if it you’re your needs.

Get Faster on the Keyboard

Speed is a priority, so using a typing tool to save time is advised. Mark teaches some shortcuts, including moving to the Dvorak keyboard, potentially a real time-saver.

Mark concludes with a message to programmers, a request to make programs that

• Serve the user properly
• Make the most common tasks the easiest
• Make them accessible on the keyboard.

His valid point is that moving 3 fingers to do an action is much faster than moving your hand to grab the mouse.

Overall A Good Review In Information Management

Bit Literacy - Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload provides some real tools to manage the volume of information we are all faced with today. Mark makes several very useful suggestions. Some of them are not new ideas, but they are worth reviewing again to help you to get a grip on your time again.

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